REVIEWED IN OFFBEAT MAGAZINE JUNE 2014

Eden Brent

Jigsaw Heart

(Yellow Dog Records)

01 June 2014 — by Brett Milano

Mississippi blues woman Eden Brent has an interesting backstory. Early in her career she befriended blues elder Boogaloo Ames, and was his protégée (and eventual caretaker) for 16 years until his death in 2002. Their partnership was celebrated in the PBS documentary “Sustaining the Sound” and a second TV documentary in South Africa, where she remains an underground success.

Her fourth solo album seems designed to bring her up from underground, showing how many styles she can handle. There isn’t even a blues track until midway through the disc; instead it opens with a deep country ballad and proceeds through some introspective singer-songwriter material, one terrific rock & roll song (“Everybody Already Knows”) and closes with a declaration of love. She’s apparently taken the vintage Warners-era Bonnie Raitt albums as a stylistic template and the production is likewise uncluttered in ’70s style, getting even more of a vintage feel when Brent switches from acoustic piano to Fender electric.

But you won’t mistake Brent’svoice for Bonnie Raitt’s or anyone else’s: She’s deep and sassy with strong overtones of whiskey and honey. She gets convincingly sweet on “Valentine” and bawdy on “Let’s Go Ahead and Fall in Love” (whose lyric borrows a classic blues line about hot dogs and rolls, suggesting that something more immediate than falling in love is on the menu). Her Southern drawl is put to good use “Panther Burn,” a Mississippi small-town tale that her understated treatment brings to life.